In Case of Emergency, Break Glass
Damn it, another wall. I fumbled on the masonry for a moment, groping blindly for some lever or pull that would ricochet me back into the daylight and away from whatever that thing was. Red brick, gray mortar, imprints from fingernails but no switch. My heart was beating in my chest, pounding through my rib cage as it tried to escape the doomed body encasing it. My pulse throbbed in my ears like a series of gunshots while my hands, my whole body quivered. What had been wrong in my brain that had made me think this was a good idea? Brain. Hadn’t it said something like that before I ran? So preoccupied with the memory, with my desperate want to leave this place I didn’t hear the footsteps sloshing through the narrows behind me. Cold hands gripped me, first by the collar of my shirt, then by the neck. Teeth gnashed in the air as I shoved the desiccated husk off my shoulders and into the shallow water surrounding our feet. It snarled up at me, an asexual shell that had been human once, a long time ago.
Static crackled on the air and echoed through the slouching darkness beyond that thing struggling to its feet in front of me. A voice, soft and masculine, echoed out through the night.
“Try not to take it so seriously,” he said. “It’s only a game.”
The brick work to my left began to crackle, rotated around to reveal a glass case with a fireman’s axe. “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass,” it read in large, red embossed lettering. There was a small hammer attached to a chain beside it. I grabbed it and smashed the glass, yanking the axe from its pedestal inside. The thing was up from the water now, snarling at me with yellowed, gore soaked fangs that had been filed into tiny spears inside its head. I turned the axe in my hands to the sharp, pointed end on the back and swung it into the green flesh before me. The thing, not a man any more but some drooling animal that had thirsted for the life inside me collapsed into a heap at my feet.
“Very good,” the voice echoed from an unseen speaker box over my head. “One down, a hundred more to go.”
